presenting the very original bose flame

[Eliot Lim <eliot@u.washington.edu>]

holy crow, batman.. i managed to find this deep in my archives.  one
of the true gems of usenet from a very long time ago...

enjoy!

eliot

p.s. it is extremely unlikely that mr. pierce still resides at
the addresses listed.  note the date of the post.  i don't
read the audio newsgroups to know if he is still around.

p.p.s while this article addresses an audio product i don't for
one moment think that the same kind of thing is not happening in
the auto industry.  my current favorite whipping boy, the truck,
would be completely analogous to the 901's.

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Article 7683 (16 more) in rec.audio:
>From: rdp@atexnet.UUCP (Dick Pierce)
Subject: Bose 901's: What's the buzz?
Message-ID: <89@sweelink.atexnet.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 89 18:05:59 GMTpage
Organization: EPPS Inc.,Bedford,MA 01730
Lines: 147
 
Well, someone finally got around to asking the question, "So
what's so bad about the Bose 901 anyway. I think they're the best
thing since oxygen!" I guess it all depends upon what you think a
speaker is supposed to do.
 
Let me point out that I have been involved both professionally
and peripherally in the audio business for at least as long as
Bose and while that does not give me any legitimate claim to any
higher degree of authority than anyone else (after all, there are
those that have been in the business longer, and are still
bumbling idiots), it does, I think, provide me with a different
perspective than most. Add to that a significant portion of that
time I spent designing systems and drivers for a variety of
manufacturers, and have been involved with the engineering
department at Bose in terms of attempting to provide them with an
on-shore driver manufacturing source.
 
Be that as it may.. If the Bose advocates out there are making
the claim that 901s are robust, play extraordinarily loud, are
very impressive, provide the listener with a wide, position
independent and quite unique sonic image, have chest thumping
bass, are capable of causing extremes of aural damage, then there
is nothing that I can say to refute these points. If, on top of
that, you say that you like the effect, even religiously, then I
have no choice but to enthusiastically agree. Even if you want to
declare that they are among the best selling speaker systems of
all time, you got a real shot at that one, too.
 
If, on the other hand, you are willing to state that, given any
one of a number of objective criteria, that the Bose 901s are
accurate, low distortion (in a general sense) reproducers of the
input signal fed to them, then in no way can you be taken
seriously. If you want to declare that the speakers provide a
sonically accurate and realistic presentation of the music being
played through them, then I (and many other people) must categor-
ically disagree.
 
>From the viewpoint of the most basic of simple objective measure-
ments, the Bose 901s fail more miserably than any 200 randomly
chosen system, from the viewpoint of accurately presented images,
sorry, the speakers lose badly. From the standpoint of presenting
the music with a minimal amount of perturbation, changes, and
editorializing, the speakers not only fail, but they do so quite
intentionally.
 
The Bose 901s were never intended at any time during their
conception or history to be accurate, low coloration loud-
speakers. They were intended to present the listener with unique,
readily and strongly identifiable signature which must, as a
result, impose itself on every single musical selection played
through them. Their very design subjects them to the extremes of
sensitivity of placement, yet their imaging capability (that is,
the ability to be able to accurately sense precise locations of
instrument) is so demonstrably poor, that they appear placement
insensitive as a result.
 
The basic theory Amar Bose bases the design on (the supposed dup-
lication of the ratio of direct to reverberant sound in a concert
hall, not, as he states, the ratio of direct to reflected sound,
two very very different things) is not only flawed, it is
completely wrong.
 
My own personal objection to the whole Bose philosophy is that it
is consciously predicated on, in my opinion, intellectual
dishonesty. I have talked at great lengths with the engineering
staff within Bose. They are quite knowledgeable, and they know
and readily admit how bad the systems are, objectively. I was
called in as the engineering representative for the driver
company I worked for.  Bose was interested in a domestic source
for 2 inch cone tweeters.  We had provided samples which were
significantly flatter in frequency response than the specs Bose
had provided. They were lower in distortion, they had wider
bandwidth and better dispersion. And they were rejected precisely
for those reasons. Around 10 kHz to 13 kHz, the Bose standard
tweeter exhibited gross response perturbations, on the order of
+- 8 dB, while the samples we provided were well within +- 2 dB.
Bose would not accept our samples unless we could build in the
same gross response errors.
 
The engineering staff at Bose was well aware of the impact of
these sorts of problems, they knew precisely how to correct them,
and they knew that it caused not increase in price to eliminate
them. Yet they required these tweeters to be as dismal as they
are. Their reasoning for this was simple: To make such a drastic
improvement in the systems would result in a severe credibility
crisis. If the speakers were so good before, how come they sound
so different now?
 
When I suggested that these changes could be incorporated
gradually, so no one would notice that things were much better, I
got a bunch of knowing smiles and nods, and the admonition "well,
if no one would notice, then why bother?" From those in the
organization that might have a somewhat higher level of integrity
comes the response "Yeah, I know the stuff is shit, but you can't
argue with success, can you?" I say you can.
 
It's one thing to dabble in speakers, as many "engineers" do.
They try hard, blissful in their ignorance of the basic operating
principles, and may even produce something that others might even
spend good money for. It may be awful, but they sincerely believe
its the best.
 
It's another thing all together to assemble a staff of very
talented, knowledgeable engineers, and give them the directive of
propagating the legacy of demonstrably inaccurate, colored
products as Bose has quite consciously done. That Bose uses "high
quality" parts is questionable: the drivers that are used are
amongst the cheapest, lowest quality available. That Bose has
very tight quality control, that the specs of these drivers are
very rigidly controlled is quite another. That is undeniable. The
program that is in place to ensure that the tweeters remain as
bad as they have always been is most impressive. Nobody of
anywhere near that size checks out their components as thoroughly
as Bose does. They test every single driver. And they reject
every single driver whose frequency response is too smooth and
accurate, that has too little distortion, that is, in an objec-
tive word, too "good". All this to achieve a very particular
sound.
 
But this is, in the opinion of many of us, contrary to the notion
of "high fidelity". The goal to many of us is to eliminate any
"particular" sound, to have the reproduction chain as neutral as
possible. Why, we ask, should the speakers be allowed to editori-
alize, to contort, to color and to distort the sound in any way.
Why should the speakers not attempt to reproduce the input signal
with the absolute minimum amount of change possible? Why, in
short, should we be forced to listen to the speakers and not the
music?
 
There are several simple experiments that can be performed that
can easily demonstrate my point. One that we used to perform a
lot during my retail days was so convincing of the extreme
magnitude of the failings of Bose 901s as accurate transducers
that we had nearly 100% success rate in convincing 901 owners to
get rid of them for nearly anything else.
 
The procedure was simple: make a recording of a friend speaking
(or singing) in a relatively reverberant free environment. Have
your friend recite, say, the odd numbers, or every other line of
some poem. Then, play the recording back through the Bose, with
your friend standing in between the two speakers. Now, have your
friend recite the missing even numbers or the alternate lines of
the poem.
 
Try hard to convince yourself that the speakers are not playing.
Try very hard. Very very hard. With some speakers, you have a
chance of being fooled. Not with Bose 901s. The impression that
they give is one of extreme box coloration, of offensive booming,
chesty response, of a distinct and annoying hollowness. This is a
simple test that it can't even do a respectable job on, a test
that many, many other systems of far lower pretense can do far
better on.
 
I remember when Discount Records here in Boston had Bose 901s as
the standard store listening system. I would often have to return
records that had very obvious flaws such as complete breakup at
high frequencies, ridiculous amounts of noise, such as what you
might hear as a result of spilling beer on a disc, and so forth.
When they were played over the 901 systems, these obvious flaws
were completely inaudible.
 
In one instance, I went to the Radio Shack down the street,
bought a pair of one of the little Minimus systems, for which I
have no great love, brought them back to the store, hooked them
up to their receiver, and was able to hear clearly the problems I
was returning the record for. Even at levels far below the limits
of either system, the cheap piece of shit Radio Shack speakers
were more revealing of the obvious gross record flaws than the
Bose were. Maybe, indeed, this is a distinct advantage for 901's.
 
Again, that 901s provide a unique presentation of the music is
undeniable. That you may like that, is inarguable. However, if
your criteria for a good loudspeaker is one that imposes very
little of its own sound on the music, that distorts the signal in
the least ways possible, that is neutral in character and
provides the most amount of uneditorialized information to the
listener, then the Bose 901 systems fail resoundingly.
--
Dick Pierce                                    EPPS, Inc.
(617) 276-7317                                 32 Wiggins Ave.
{kodak,ll-xn,sun,genrad}!atexrd!dpierce        Bedford, MA. 01730